Posts for June 24, 2021

I’ve forgotten what I came to say.

It’s

sorta

like

as

if

it was gonna be about Juneteenth

the one that’s just gone by

and

it

was

gonna

maybe

start

with

something

like

“Why hello, Ms Hemings, Are You the One Whose Family Works for Thom?”

Or maybe that was gonna be its title.

I mean I capitalized all the right words.

Save one. And I wonder what it means that I

didn’t?

couldn’t?

wouldn’t?

capitalize an H hello.

Oh,

I remember now,

I was distracted.

Right.

By an email.

By an email about an Arthur Miller play,

the one called Incident at Vichy,

that I was in when just a boy of twenty six

or maybe I was twenty seven.

Either way,

I thought I was a man then

and I was scared of being thirty.

The distraction of the email

or

perhaps

remembering the fear of being

thirty

took me not to Vichy

but to Paris

when I’d become a man of sixty two

or maybe I was sixty three.

Either way,

I knew I was a boy then

and I was scared of sixty five.

In Paris

every day

to get to butoh class…

You know butoh, right?

The dance?

The one where you move slow enough

that your body empties

and the spirits of your relatives

who exploded with Hiroshima

or maybe it was Nagasaki

can enter you

and have their say

embodied?

so anyway

every day

I had to leave what used to be the Hotel California…

I know,

I know,

but that’s what they used to call it

back then when I was there.

Just bear with me, will ya?

Thanks.

so anyway

every day

I had to leave the Left Bank’s Hotel California

and cross

the Bridge of the Archbishopric…

aka The Pont de l’Archevêché

but I prefer the English word Archbishopric

in hopeful hopes

that your first-class brain

will bounce toward boarding schools

and indigenous Canadians

and bodily remains.

so anyway I crossed The Pont de l’Archevêché

to cut behind Notre-Dame de Pari

to take the Pont Saint-Louis

to cross the Pont Louis Philippe

so I could saunter up Rue Vieille du Temple

to get to butoh class.

Oh.

Right.

My distracted-by-butoh point here

is

that

on the ass-end of Île de la Cité

right there in Notre-Dame’s backyard

there were

and still most likely are

some steps

down to the water

and

there’s a gate there to stop you from going

down

and the gate

was always

locked.

One day

on the way home from butoh class

the gate was unlocked and open

and

I

went

down

the

steps

and

at the bottom of the stairs

I found myself…

or at least I found a part of me I’ve carried ever since.

so anyway

I found myself

looking at the Seine

from the oh so disadvantaged point

of the

mémorial des martyrs de la déportation

aka

where they, whoever they were,

put them – we know who “them” were –

on the boats

that took

them

to

the

trains

that took

them

to

the

camps

that…

And there I stood

with nothing I could do

but wave

a kind of metaphorical goodbye.

I promise you I did not think

right then

that even if they, whoever they were,

had help from IBM

they were nowhere as efficient as we could be

back home

where we just lynched them on the spot

and tossed them in the river

like we did with Emmett Till

or else we burned down part of Tulsa

and hoped those who lived would leave.

And

that’s

when I realized

I was

sitting

on a bus

on June 15th in 2021

and the Black man I had nodded to

was speaking.

“Sorry,”

he said,

“I took you for one of those white guys

who won’t look up at Black folk

no matter what we do.

I was rude,”

he said,

“I should have said hello.

What’s that book you’re reading?”

And I handed him

On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed.

He took the book,

looked at its back cover,

wrote down the title and its author,

and handed

back

the book

to me.

“Good?”

he asked

and only barely raised an eyebrow when I blurted,

“Good? It’s great!

Makes me wanna turn in my well-worn coonskin cap!”

Oops.

I don’t know if he knew shit

about Davy Crockett’s headgear

or Jim Bowie’s knife

but I know he knew what coon meant

and suddenly so did I.

Oops.

Somehow

he pointedly refused to take offense

as

he

stood

up

and

pulled

the

cord

while nodding kindly if deliberately

at me.

“Thanks,” he said, “I’ll read it.”

And when the bus stopped at the corner

he got off.

Let me describe every town-by-the-interstate:
off the highway, concrete maze of gas stations,
hotels, fast-food chains, shopping complexes
for about a mile. The only real trees anchored
in abutments, adrift in asphalt and halogen light. 

In this miasma, nothing is distinct. Every fifteen miles
a new/the same McWendys, brokered by a buffer
of progress (I guess), this world we’ve become
accustomed to living through.

Sometimes I drive aimlessly back into the country,
where feral homes lie overgrown
next to these new McMansions
in fallow cornfields. I wonder, who is anything 
for? If you could see a JC Penney at Easter, browse
an acre of same-looking dresses that will deteriorate 
in six months, would you feel as sick as I do, having
lived here for so long?

I dream of climbing 
out of debt somehow and into my own plot of grass–
I guess many of my generation feel the same–
worried that the only patch of green we’ll ever see
will grow above our bodies,
capped by a granite stone.

Polaroid photos pepper the walls,
held up by drying masking tape
that holds on only through sheer force of will.

They appear older than they are,
aged by the elements, time,
and the weight of the stories they hold.

Each one alone tells more
than any words every could,
no matter how many you used
or how you arranged them.

A collage of moments
frozen in time that you 
would otherwise forget.

Yet they remain,
steadfast keepers of the past,
telling the stories
that words never could.

there’s a time to 
be giving to those who need
what we have to give away
because you love them
but there are people
that will never understand
what you’re handing them
they take
and 
take
and 
take
and 
take
because they’ve never felt
what it is like to pull
your own heart through
the narrow spaces 
of your jagged ribs

don’t talk to us about loss
and love and pain
we’ve been there
standing on a back road at night
barefoot
no car
no home
not a single 
fucking 
person
to hear our spines
break
under the weight of it all

somewhere in the distance
a saxophone wails out of a window of a car
probably going too fast down Limestone
fireflies blink in the muggy air
nobody is here
in the musky dark
I am left with only hints of civilization
in this Lexington summer night

I have only a possum
for company
in this, the witching hour
he stands behind the fence
tail twitching ever so slightly
watching my hens
as they put themselves to bed
clucking softly with alarm
and I haven’t the heart to scare him away

Soft-stroke Merlin, a ten-pound tabby-tummy rollover: cup a purr. 

i. fence

on the corner of highland
and corneal the post and chain
is detached, hanging in time.
the bend not from intruders
but from someone avoiding
a kiss. she said it was too close
to home to let anything escape.

ii. tree

a tulip poplar take over
and my poetic heart silently
rallies for it’s roots. yes take
us down, breath in our water
before our peonies. twist into
our sewer pipes, make us
penny pinch in repair while
we wait for bloom in spring.

iii. east-side of the house

there is no break in mid-day
unless the clouds take a lunch
they sit in front of the sun, gobbling
in rest, laying fog headed on reflective pails.
still, the house wrinkles into sunburns, peeling
divets into vinyl skin. the damage is obvious:
what world would let anyone so exposed?

We told each other our move was temporary,
but we never had the chance to return.
In fall, homesickness turned to sorrow.
In winter, the fields turned to cowshit and mud.

We never had the chance to return
to our home warmed by southern windows and wood.
In winter, when the fields turned to cowshit and mud,
I would walk the washed-out gravel drive

to our home, once warmed by southern windows and wood,
and cry at all we’d left and all we’d lost.
I would walk the washed-out gravel drive
alone in the frozen silence that comes before snow.

I cried at all we’d left and all we’d lost
when he fell asleep at night
in the frozen silence that comes with snow.
We had told each other our move was temporary.

My older grandson
just started work
as a food runner,
emphasis on runner,
two steep flights
between the kitchen 
and a popular rooftop
deck at a mid-scale
gaslight-district bistro.

He carries a family
tradition of bar/restaurant
work (hospitality industry) 
now [sigh] a somewhat
profane appropriation
of this pillar of Islam and
many indigenous cultures
elsewhere–and did you know
Desert Storm was first
called Desert Crusade?) 
but I digress.

Like his mother, father, 
multiple grandparents, aunts,
uncles and cousins, Brando
has the chance to learn 
two very valuable skills.
And after two hours 
of stories from us all
over Fathers’ Day
dinner he knows it.

First, the art of being
polite to people who aren’t
being polite to you.
Second, how to be
actively attentive
to the needs of others
while remaining
mostly invisible.

you remanence
on how your mother
would usher you &
your siblings to bed
when the full moon
came out on a thursday

how she didn’t want
y’all to be too wild

& we remanence
on how strange friendships
can be—-how they fade
& reform, come & go,
old ones leave &
better ones enter

how our friendship
molded in the oddest of ways